Reconstruction 6.1 (Winter 2006)
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Imagined Cities, Real Futures: SimCity and the Co-Production of Urban Dystopias / Samuel Gerald Collins
Abstract: While the author of this chapter agrees with anthropologists who reject an urban studies predicated on postmodern surfaces and insist that we analyze cities in regional, national and global contexts of political economy, he nevertheless suggests that the urban imaginary has never been so important: Movies, television and music have proven all too useful in the continued vilification of an urban "underclass." In 2001, in order to explore the role media might play in the structuring and delimitating of the ways we think about cities, Collins assigned SimCity, a computer simulation game combining models of urban development with "cellular automata," to his "Anthropology of American Culture" class. Students were asked to design any city they liked; the author analyzed the subsequent imagined cities ethnographically, "visiting" them in the capacity of a digital anthropologist. The resulting spaces evidenced high levels of oppression and urban abandonment, echoing the ruinous, urban divestment in the United States in the post-World War II era and, in particular, the rise of parasitic "edge cities" around pathologized, urban cores. Although SimCity theoretically allows for the development of a wide variety of urban forms and the final result of a session, moreover, can never be entirely predicted, the game is nevertheless structured according to historically particular perspectives of the U.S. city as a "growth machine" that preempt the formation of other, more utopian, spaces. Through its narrow, monetarist interpretation of the city, Collins suggests the extent to which SimCity delimits the realization of alternative futures and co-opts players into co-performances of urban dystopia. This chapter raises question regarding the veracity of ethnographic method and its relation to the virtual worlds of video games while also providing insight into the relation between game players' expectations and their imaginations.
<1> In the United States, urban anthropology is often said to begin as an elaboration of Robert Park's "Chicago School" concentrating ethnographic observation on the ecological niches that made up Park's "concentric ring" model of urban life and development (Low 1996). Subsequent anthropologies would produce increasingly nuanced--and even poetic--evocations of the richly textured lives of economically and politically marginalized peoples generally ignored and/or misrepresented by other disciplines engaged in urban studies (Cf. Liebow 1967; Whyte 1943). However, as Steven Gregory (1998) has eloquently demonstrated, this strain of urban anthropology had the effect of analytically separating the lives of the poor from macro-processes (over)determining their subjugation and, by the 1980s, would play into reactionary accounts of the "underclass" blaming the victims of ruinous urban policy for their own misery (Reed 1991; Williams 1994); "In fact the distinctiveness of ghetto culture was often, if not typically, defined in precisely the same terms as the racial stereotypes held by the backers of the culture of poverty thesis" (Gregory 1998:9). Hence, the same, multiplex relationships of urban poor lionized by anthropologists could be pathologized--with the help of spurious casuistries linking "broken families," "welfare," "crime" and "race" (Cf. Wilson 1987).
<2> Compounding this was the "postmodern" proclivity to analyze the city as mise en scène for subaltern, individuated experiences, from Fredric Jameson's "cognitive maps" to Michel de Certeau's "long poem of walking" (de Certeau 1984: 101). By characterizing the city as heterotopic and "soft," these theorists represented urban spaces as so much disjecta membra arranged for eclectic appropriation by postmodern selves.
For at moments like this, the city goes soft; it awaits the imprint of an identity. For better or for worse, it invites you to remake it, to consolidate it into a shape you can live in. You, too. Decide who you are, and the city will again assume a fixed form around you. Decide what it is, and your own identity will be revealed, like a position on a map fixed by triangulation. (Raban 1988: 9-10)
Developing the associative analyses of urban space, literature and psychology pioneered by Walter Benjamin in his "arcades" project (while suppressing the dialectic that informed Benjamin's work), anthropologists and cultural studies practitioners advanced a vision of the city that, while anarchic and sometimes even revolutionary in its riotous, democratized semiosis of place, nevertheless was complicit in the capitalism of the day. The locusclassicus of this postmodern flaneur was none other than the consumer, "buying" a succession of urban forms and investing identity in places in a rapture of commodity fetishism.
<3> The growth of an urban anthropology grounded in political economy and mediating between textured ethnography of place, on the one hand, and the embeddedness of urban communities in regional-, state- and global processes, on the other, ameliorates some of these tendencies (Low and McDonogh 2001). This current of urban anthropology--together with related work in geography, history and cultural studies--has acknowledged that, while the "soft" city may sometimes accept the imprint of different identities, the city doesn't "invite" everyone to "remake" it; one instrument of Foucaultian oppression bludgeoning oppressed people is precisely this bureaucratic "fixing" of identity, the withholding of an imprimatur to be anything other than poor, "underclass" or "dangerous." It is the movement between individuated narratives, on the one hand, and a sense that people's lives are bound up in Schumpeterian "creative destruction" and institutionalized forms of racism that they have little control over, on the other, that gives this political economic approach its explanatory power.
<4> Nevertheless, the more imaginative flights of a "postmodern" anthropology are still useful. The growing segregation of race and class in U.S. cities documented so clearly in the work of Massey and Denton (1993) suggests that the powerful understand the powerless primarily through invidious imaginaries rather than through face-to-face encounters; the Other is "known" through the violent, mythic cycles of police dramas and gangster movies. For example, Setha Low's (2001) research on gated communities in San Antonio, Texas and New York uncovers the role racism and xenophobia play in the continued flight of middle-class people in the form of imagined threats from the "outside": "Residents talk about their fear of the poor, the workers, the 'Mexicans,' and the 'newcomers,' as well as retreat behind walls where they think they will be safe" (Low 2001: 55). Low's research suggests that this fear--ontologically formed in a crucible of race and class--is a potent force in the formation of increasingly segregated citadels of middle-class life. And with the seemingly absolute hegemony of mass media as the sine qua non source of "knowledge" about the Other, the material effects of these imaginaries (e.g., urban abandonment, draconian law enforcement, increased surveillance) show little sign of abating.
<5> What I have in mind is something very much like what Charles Taylor has called the social imaginary, "the ways in which people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations" (Taylor 2002: 106). These necessarily inchoate understandings, while deeply imbricated in institutionalized inequalities, lack a formal, systemic character. Instead, they percolate through the varied practices and "commonsensical" understandings of people in inconsistent and even self-contradictory ways. But the unfortunate reality of this urban imaginary is that it tends towards reactionary conservatism rather than those subaltern (though quotidian) acts detailed by Michel de Certeau (1984) and Iain Chambers (1994).
<6> Games and simulations have proven a particularly privileged site for this sort of imaginary, from the early simulations of the RAND corporation rehearsing post-War neo-imperialism to the phallocentric mythic-cycles performed in some role-playing campaigns (Cornish 1980; Fine). For example, Thomas Schelling's computer simulation of a "neighborhood" of red- and blue-colored hex agents naturalizes patterns of segregation historically particular to the United States in the decades of urban renewal and suburbanization.
In the first frame blues and reds are randomly distributed. But they do not stay that way for long, because each agent, each simulated person, is ethnocentric . . . Very quickly . . . the reds gravitate to their own neighborhood, and a few seconds later the segregation is complete: reds and blues live in two distinct districts. (Rauch 2002:36)
According to Rauch, the beauty of Schelling's simulation is that it "proves" that segregation is the product of individual choice (hence "natural") rather than institutional forms of racism (e.g., urban policy, redlining). "The realization that their individual preferences lead to a collective outcome indistinguishable from thoroughgoing racism might surprise them no less than it surprised me and, many years ago, Thomas Schelling" (Rauch 2002:36-37).
<7> But the effects of games and simulations go far beyond the mere recapitulation of extant power relations and inequalities; they are one of the techniques through which people and institutions lay claim to the future. That is, by simulating future scenarios--anticipating the future--people demarcate the horizon of the possible. For example, Stefan Helmreich's ethnography, Silicon Second Nature (1998), explores the emergence of artificial life, i.e., computer simulations of biological complexity that are sometimes construed as meeting the criteria of life. However: out of all of the potentially infinite forms possible, Helmreich finds disturbingly familiar echoes of racism, classism and androcentrism "coded" into this emergent, artificial life, i.e., "life-as-it-could-be" is imagined in terms of "life-as-we-think-it-is" (Helmreich 1998:13). For Helmreich, seemingly innocuous (and even charming) programs like "Sugarscape" and "Life" preempt the future with dull capitulations of the present, extending local, "tempocentric" inequalities and hierarchies across a universal time horizon (Textor 1999).
<8> SimCity is an extraordinarily long-lived computer game simulating urban planning and development through a combination of algorithms representing variables like land value, crime and pollution together with "cellular automata," stochastic interactions of these algorithms that insure very realistic complexity and unpredictability (Emmeche 1994). Players begin with a budget and an empty terrain; through judicious zoning, utility construction and lawmaking, they can attract a population (Sims) and construct a vast, futuristic metropolitan utopia or, conversely, a bankrupt dystopia riven by crime and abandonment. The course of the game is visible on a large gridded map of the city, each square of which represents "stacks" of interrelated variables. Although the game allows considerable latitude on the part of players (the "mayors" of the their cities), part of SimCity's enduring popularity rests on its "realism"; not just any flight of fancy will work and players engaging in reckless urban policy may quickly lose the game.
<9> In 2001 I assigned students SimCity as homework that some students greeted with positive glee, others--presumably less skilled in the byzantine world of computer games--with sullen dread. However: playing the game well was not the point of the exercise; instead, I urged students to develop a city--any city. Later, we went back over their cities for the biases inherent in the game. Out of all of the characteristics one might model in an urban simulation, which ones were most important for the makers of SimCity? Which parts of urban life were not represented? Students had several interesting insights, particularly regarding the encoding of "race" in the form of the putatively "race-less" Sims. In the end, the goal of the assignment was to see SimCity as a cultural construct illustrative of contemporary policies, attitudes and stereotypes about cities in the United States, or, to paraphrase Stefan Helmreich (1998), when cities-as-they-could-be are represented as cities-as-we-think-they-are.
Fodor's Guide to Hell: touring simulated dystopias
<10> What sorts of cities do players build? The conclusions are based on 13 of my students' cities (see Appendix A). I haven't performed empirical tests on this data; rather, the following constitute "ethnographic" observations of these thirteen, futuristic sites, from the perspective, perhaps, of a bemused (and oftentimes horrified) visitor from the past.
Zones. All cities utilized large "blocks" of residential, commercial and industrial zones, rather than "mixed" zones. Within zones, all but the largest two cities (Cities 12 and 13) had more than 80 percent of residential areas zoned as "light" residence. "Government" zones (including a number of special buildings) were interspersed in the interstices of other zones.
Abandonment. The least successful cities in terms of land values and budget (i.e. cities 2, 4, 5, 6, 10) had extremely high residential abandonment rates, from 40 to 85 percent, respectively.
Police Brutality. The most successful cities (in terms of increasing land values and low rates of abandonment) were, with the exception of one city, over-policed (i.e. they had police stations where arrest rates exceeded crime rates). The one city without oppressive police stations (# 9) had the highest crime rate of all successful cities (23). All of the most successful cities had jails and all but one had a "maximum security prison" [1]. While strategy guides (Cf. Kramer 2000) warn that police oppression has the effect of lowering "aura" (and, therefore, land value), none of these cities seem to have experienced this.
Business deals. All but two cities took advantage of "business deals," that is, allowing the construction of businesses or institution (e.g. a "Maximum Security Prison") that will produce undesirable NIMBY effects but contribute (directly or indirectly) to the city's budget [2]. The most successful cities (7,8,9,12) had all engaged in business deals.
Education. All successful cities (7, 8, 9, 11) had multiple educational institutions (schools, colleges, libraries, museums and universities); all had "educational quotients" above 115, while only one of the unsuccessful cities (#3) had one that high [3].
Transportation. All of the cities had extensive road systems. Only six of the thirteen cities had train and/or subway systems. Only one of the successful cities (#11) had developed a train and subway system [4].
<11> Would you want to live in these cities? Ranging from the dilapidated and the de-populated, on the one hand, and the stentorian and oppressive, on the other, the sorts of utopian spaces associated with urban planning from Plato to Le Corbusier to Frank Lloyd Wright are conspicuous in their absence (Harvey 2000). While even the oppressive urban forms of Robert Moses or Baron Georges Haussmann drew their legitimation from their utopian promise, the animus for these cities lies elsewhere than the betterment of human life (Berman 1982). Instead, they seem all too real; the 13 cities discussed above, while putatively existing in the "future," all bear a striking resemblance to U.S. cities (and particularly "edge cities") in the late-twentieth/early twenty-first century. All rely heavily (or exclusively) on automobile transportation for travel between large undifferentiated blocks of suburban-style residential, commercial and industrial "zones." All have over-developed criminal justice systems, in terms of numbers of "oppressive" police stations and the number of jails. All have well-developed educational infrastructures, particularly with regards to higher education, since all but two of the 13 cities have at least 1 college. In addition, all have well- (or over-) developed entertainment industries, expressed in special buildings (stadia, theme parks) and landmark buildings (SimCity3000 allows players to festoon their cities with famous structures from all over the world--Kuala Lumpur's "Petronas Towers" proved particularly popular). Finally, less successful cities (in term of land values and/or negative budgets) have residential abandonment rates in excess of 40 percent.
<12> From its inception in 1989, SimCity has, through three, progressively complex upgrades (SimCity Classic, SimCity 2000 and SimCity 3000), paralleled certain trends in urban studies, particularly the perception of the city as a "growth machine" [5]. As Logan and Molotch (1987:13) argue: "The growth ethic pervades virtually all aspects of local life, including the political system, the agenda for economic development, and even cultural organizations like baseball teams and museums." Other ethics that would, for example, privilege the "life world" of the city--i.e. those use values people create in their communities--are excluded; the urban form is reduced to another machine for capital accumulation (Logan and Molotch 1987: 111). Although there is no "goal" in SimCity--no one way of evaluating success--the simulation is nevertheless tied to a model of growth, particularly in population and land value. First, many of the "rewards" (typically interesting buildings or opportunities) are tied to population growth; attaining a certain population activates the offer of, say, a "Mayor's House" or "Theme Park" (Kramer 2000: 408). Indeed, most of the guides to SimCity presuppose growth as the sine qua non measure of success. Dargahi and Bremer (1995: 279) even warn that the drive to form densely populated cities might overwhelm other "growth" goals. And while "population" is one variable favored in this simulated, "growth machine," the other is most certainly "land value," which profoundly affects the city's budget and hence impacts the number of things a mayor can "buy" (roads, colleges, hospitals, etc.).
Why does land value matter? For two reasons, actually. First, one of the primary factors in tax revenue calculation is the average land value. You can, therefore, increase taxes not only by expanding population or raising rates, but also by raising land values. It's probably the most difficult method, but it's also the most enduring. Second, if you don't cultivate your land values, you'll never see some of the biggest, coolest buildings. (Kramer 2000:197)
While SimCity 3000 includes other indices of success or failure, e.g. education, health, pollution, "aura," these values do not in themselves trigger "rewards"; rather, they "feed back" in various, stochastic ways to population and land value.
<13> The enemy of "land value" is most certainly "crime"; the two are closely correlated in all versions of SimCity.
Above-average crime has a devastating effect on land values. If you let your lawbreaking Sims run rampant, your tax base will deteriorate . . . Police coverage and skillful spending on structures with high crime affects are your best way top bring down crime. Don't forget your jails; they contribute profoundly to your city's crime fighting abilities. (Kramer 2001:206)
Moreover, since crime concentrates in areas of heavy density, and since "land value" is never high in dense developments anyway and tends to accrue in low-density developments, players tend to balance densely populated "urban cores" with diffuse, low-density residential and commercial developments.
<14> The resemblance of all this to "suburban sprawl" is more than just coincidental. Contrary to the mixed land-use of Jane Jacobs (1961), SimCity favors undifferentiated blocks of residential, industrial or commercial development, separated, preferably, by roads and a tree-line. For example, SimCity "Classic" players are advised to:
Build Residential and Commercial zones as long strips (Residential: 8 tiles deep/Commercial: 6 tiles deep) with Roads on either side. Leave space in the center for Parks, Surface Water, or municipal structures. The fewer intersections your city has, the better traffic will flow. (Dargahi 1991:164)
And while SimCity Classic is said to be biased towards railroads (Dargahi 1991: 148), SimCity2000 and 3000 unabashedly favor roads as the cheapest alternative (your citizens--Sims--don't privilege one form of transportation over another). Not only does the SimCity 3000 guide advise against ever lowering the Road Department's budget below 100 percent (Kramer 2001: 126), it even explains that automobiles are only a "moderate" source of pollution (Kramer 2001: 225), ranking far behind the "University" and the "Theme Park."
<15> In addition, SimCity 3000 introduces the idea of an "aura," "the good feelings generated by your city," that is negatively impacted by pollution and blight. To offset their deleterious effects on aura, the SimCity 3000 guide recommends placing industrial and polluting commercial sites in large blocks on the edges of the map, where they cannot "infect" neighboring residential and commercial sites and where some of the baleful effects will "leak" off the map (and out of your city altogether) (Kramer 2000: 249). The net effect of these preferences for straight, uncomplicated road patterns and for clustering aura-reducing sites results in an acknowledged bias for larger, denser zones of residential, commercial and industrial property. However, the "official" strategy guide to SimCity 3000 advises mayors to place isolated blocks of zones in the middle of these residential and commercial sprawls, since they may help ease traffic flow and they make your city look "more realistic" (Kramer 2000: 87).
<16> SimCity 3000 has an almost hyper-real look to it. Mayors are able to place "landmarks" in their cities drawn from around the world and cities quickly become festooned with various Petronas Towers and Bank of America buildings. "Rewards" also come in the form of distinctive structures, from mayors' houses to haunted houses and theme parks. "Business opportunities" also have their own associated structures: GigaMalls, Maximum Security Prisons and Casinos. The 3000 version of the game offers players countless opportunities to customize their cities with entertainment complexes and decorative curlicues, turning even the most dismal urban failure into a postmodern showcase of transnational, architectural quotation (Harvey 1989).
<17> But whatever mistakes players may have made in zoning, SimCity always allows mayors (within budgetary constraints) to demolish buildings and zones. If players have zoned too much of her or his city for commercial development, for example, one can simply demolish those buildings and re-zone that space for residential development. And if Sims begin abandoning property the player can always destroy the entire neighborhood and build again. As the strategy guide for SimCity Classic advises, "Don't be afraid to demolish. If there's a demand, your Sims will build again--they've no emotional attachment to their buildings. Progress always requires substantial demolition" (Dargahi 1991: 85). SimCity 2000 offers even more specific advice: "The Urban Renewal Trick allows you to replace slummy districts with higher value zones. All you do is plow down your decaying zones and replace them with new zones in the hope of raising land values" (Dargahi and Bremer 1995: 158).
<18> While SimCity is certainly realistic, it privileges one "realism" over others; that is, SimCity is a game based (in part) on contemporary, dominant theories of urban development. For example, the online, "Teacher's Guide" to SimCity (simcity.ea.com) lists a bibliography familiar to students of urban planning, including Donald Kueckeberg's Urban Planning Analysis, Carl Hiller's Babylon to Brasilia and Gallion's and Eisner's The Urban Pattern. In general, the simulation reflects a certain orthodoxy in economic models of urban planning and residential location, particularly with its focus on the Sims' movements between zones (successful trips) as a driving force in the growth of an city. This would seem to be an application of what has been called the "travel-cost/housing-cost trade off" theory, which "basically states that, given an opportunity, a perfect mobile household would move to a plot where it can easily satisfy its spatial requirements while paying acceptable transport costs" (Hoang and Wakely 2000: 7-8). However: the actual shape of cities is oftentimes at considerable variance with this model. For example, from the 1960s, U.S. cities have been abandoned on massive scales, reaching rates as high as 15 percent in places like Chicago in the early 1970s (Wilson and Margulis 1994). As Hoang and Wakely (2000:8) argue, this urban economic theory doesn't account for these more complex (and even counterintuitive) phenomena, e.g. the large-scale abandonment of usable housing stock coupled with the simultaneous gentrification of contiguous neighborhoods (Marcuse 1985). For these configurations, we should seek explanations not only in the actions of landed capital, but also in the historical relationships of capital to the state. In other words, the formation of "urban blight" in U.S. cities cannot be understood apart from "the larger pattern of historical relations in production and rent collection" (Logan and Molotch 1987:134). That "larger pattern" includes rigid racial segregation and institutional racism enacted in virtually all sectors of private and public life, from the denial of credit to African Americans to the destruction of African American neighborhoods during "urban renewal" in the 1950s and 1960s and the continued denudation of cities over the course of wave after wave of suburbanization--underwritten all the while by state and national governments (Hirsch; Williams 2001). With the criminalization of vast swathes of the population and their confinement to areas of the city presently unimportant to capital, the process seems complete (Castells 1998; Davis 1990).
<19> But what's important here--outside of vilifying the continued iniquities--is that this pattern of urban (under)development is particular to the United States. While Saskia Sassen's "global cities" and Manuel Castells's "Informational Cities" suggest some kinship with the morphology of U.S. cities, the heedless divestment of whole sectors of the U.S. city, together with the wholesale incarceration of absurd percentages of its population are--ironically--examples of American exceptionalism (Castells 1989; Sassen 1991). Not only is much of the world experiencing rapid urbanization, but cities have been shaped by other forces in addition to those of capital, including colonization and religion (Jeong 2001; Srinivas 2001). Indeed, much of the world's urban governments are trying to encourage their populations (or certain segments of their populations) to leave, rather than stem an intractable flow of citizenry out of the city (Smith 1996; Marcuse and van Kempen 2000). In other words, there is nothing natural or inevitable in the debased form of the U.S. city; even the well-developed suburbs of Seoul and Tokyo are less the result of inevitable "stages" than they are testament to the hegemony of U.S. global culture (Nelson 2000). With glitzy, transnational Central Business Districts, vast tracts of single-family homes, massive roadways, abandoned wastelands, huge shopping malls and stadia, all under the crushing arm of an oppressive police force, the cities my students built resemble something along the lines of City of Quartz, Mike Davis's nightmare evocations of an end-of the-millennium Los Angeles dominated by developers and riven by savage inequalities underlying a patina of corporate art and Disney spectacle (Davis 1990). By basing the SimCity simulation on a particular version of urban development, SimCity not only encourages a certain kind of play, but also projects a single vision of the urban future, undermining the "future" as a source of critical difference and thereby undermining the anticipation of alternative urbanisms (Bronner 2002). As David Harvey (2000:154) points out, the reification of future pluralities into an endless horizon of corporate power and "creative destruction" impoverishes the present by confining the terms of the debate.
If the mess seems impossible to change then it is simply because there is indeed "no alternative." It is the supreme rationality of the market versus the silly irrationality of anything else. And all those institutions that might have helped define some alternatives have either been suppressed or--with some notable exceptions, such as the church--been brow-beaten into submission.
Perusing my students' cities, then, is to confront a depressing future that looks a lot like now but with space ports and fusion reactors. However, in defense of SimCity, it is (theoretically) possible to build more utopian spaces; not only are pollution-free, "dirty-industry"-free, agriculturally-based cities possible, a visit to SimCity's website shows that people have made them! Perhaps the more interesting question here is: why didn't my students produce more progressive cities?
From Subaltern to Sublimated: play and complicity
<20> One strand of literary theory associated with Roland Barthes–the "writable" text--has proven especially useful for students of mass culture (Eagleton 1983). By showing how fans routinely appropriate commodities, invest them with alternative meanings and in turn produce their own texts "poached" from the original, critics, rejecting Adorno's a priori dismissal of mass culture, have reinterpreted consumption as a creative and social act (Jenkins 1992). From communities of fans (Bacon-Smith) to the active appropriation of global culture into local life (Appadurai; Miller), these studies have sounded an optimistic tone in an age marked by the totalizing grip of capitalism. For example, for Anne Allison (2001:244), "action figures" of gun-toting robots may be expressions of an increasingly violent society, but they can also be an affirmation of "cyborg" selves for a generation of children: "That is to say, violence is not only the end to things, but also the beginning. In the case of cyborg myths, killing terminates the life of one kind of being (human) but also initiates the life of another (cyborg)." That is, when we consider consumption qua production, the consumer becomes the ultimate arbiter of meaning; only in the context of everyday life can we perceive the practice of commodities.
<21> But while these heterogeneous practices may invest toys, music, movies and television with unintended, subaltern meanings, it should nevertheless be noted that most cultural commodities are consumed and practiced in just the ways producers intended. As Henry Jenkins (1992: 34) warns: "Readers are not always resistant; all resistant meanings are not necessarily progressive meanings; the "people" do not always recognize their conditions of alienation and subordination." Indeed, to imply that all consumptions constitute "resistance" is to hopelessly dilute the meaning of "resistance." The sorts of "textual poaching" critics have documented are extraordinary acts profoundly subversive of the overdetermined meanings of commodified culture.
<22> The cities discussed above are not "resistance"; they are, rather, dismal confirmations of a status quo. They suggest that quotidian acts of consumption may be co-productions: far from the subversive tactics of the subaltern game-player, most "productive acts" of consumption are ultimately complicit. Players play to win, and the terms of success have, to a certain extent, already been coded in the commodity. In a complex game like SimCity, players--even when alternative strategies are possible--may choose to build cities-as-they-could-be in the image of cities-as-we-think-they-are. And SimCity rewards this in the form of more interesting buildings, larger populations and "rewards."
Endnotes
[1] Note [^]For comparison's sake, I note that Baltimore has 9 police stations and 1 jail, while a comparable city in the sample I collected (#12) has 20 police stations, 5 jails and 1 maximum security prison. [^]
[2] "Business deals" are a perfect example of the SimCity's hyperreality. In the 1980s, city governments began to woo professional teams, megamalls and casinos with lucrative tax incentives, turning downtowns into consumption spectacles and, in the process, oftentimes further denuding cities of needed tax revenue (Harvey 1989, 2000). [^]
[3] All of the numerical values assigned to education, crime, land value, etc., have no intrinsic meaning. That is, they are just indicia of relative success or failure and do not refer to an intelligence quotient, a homicide rate or other "real" indices. [^]
[4] In fact, SimCity makes it particularly expensive to set up alternative transportation. While a "Sim" (the residents of SimCity) can enter a road anywhere along its length, they can only use a train or a subway if they get to a train- or subway-station (in any case, Sims will never "walk" very far). [^]
[5] SimCity 4--in the works as I write this--promises more of the same: growth over everything else. A recent preview of SimCity 4 advises players that "your best bet is to remove any cores of low-income, poorly educated residents" (IGN 2002). [^]
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